'It seemed we were walking down a canyon of death'

Cesar L. Laure/The Morning Call

Horace F. Rehrig, shown in April, 2007 when he was 82, a World War II Navy veteran served on the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga in the South Pacific during WWII. One day in January 1945, two kamikaze planes crashed into the carrier.

Horace F. Rehrig, shown in April, 2007 when he was 82, a World War II Navy veteran served on the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga in the South Pacific during WWII. One day in January 1945, two kamikaze planes crashed into the carrier. (Cesar L. Laure/The Morning Call)

Horace F. Rehrig grew up in West Bowmanstown, went to Lehighton High School and joined the Navy in the spring of 1943. He became an aviation machinist's mate third class on the aircraft carrier USS Ticonderoga. A plane captain, he oversaw maintenance of one of the ship's fighter planes. On Jan. 21, 1945, while the Ticonderoga was off the coast of Formosa, now Taiwan, and its planes were attacking Japanese airfields on the island, Japanese suicide planes appeared over the carrier. Rehrig, 19, saw the kamikazes. This Memorial Day, the 82-year-old World War II veteran and Lower Macungie resident remembers what happened next.

It was around noontime, and I was on the flight deck outside the plane captains' ready room, which was right behind the ship's island, beneath a 5- inch gun mount. A shipmate that I knew well asked me if I wanted to go to lunch. I said, "Not right away," because I wasn't finished with my paperwork.

The twin 40 mm gun mounts back on the fantail started shooting, and I looked back at them, and I looked up into the sun and I saw this Japanese aircraft just floating around up there.

We heard over the loudspeaker: "Incoming bogeys!" The gongs and bugles started going and we went into general quarters -- battle stations. Everybody's running, but I didn't have nothing to do because my station was my aircraft, an F-6 Grumman Hellcat, No. 7, and it was up. It was flying the strike at Formosa.

All of a sudden, this Japanese aircraft goes into a dive. I seen he was headed for the fantail, where we had a full batch of aircraft with their wings folded up -- fighters, torpedo bombers and dive bombers, all loaded, belly tanks of gasoline on 'em, rockets, bombs, you name it.

This guy in the Japanese aircraft seen this, and of course, that's where he would've liked to hit, right in the middle of those aircraft. That would be a big explosion, and he could practically blow the ship in half.

As they were shooting at him with these 40 mm guns, he sort of pulled up a little bit to get out of the gunfire and he overshot his target.

I was still out in the open when he went by me and hit the flight deck 15-20 feet aft of No. 1 elevator. That's the forward elevator, right in front of the island. He went through the flight deck down through the pilots' ready room -- there weren't any pilots in there - - and down to the hangar deck, and that's where the thousand-pound bomb he was carrying exploded.

The concussion blew me backwards to the plane captains' ready room. I landed across the open doorway with my belly on the bottom sill and tumbled into the room. It knocked the wind out of me.

The guy who was talking with me was blown up against the outside wall. It dazed him a little bit, and he started yelling to me, "Are you all right?" I said, "Yeah, I'm OK." But there were a lot of people who weren't OK.

Fire and black smoke was all over the place; you could barely see. A shipmate came running to me and gave me a hose and said to shoot water down the hole in the flight deck.

But there was no water. I stood there for a couple minutes, waiting for this water to come through the hose. It never came, and the smoke got so thick, I couldn't breathe. I threw the hose down the hole and ran up forward, past No. 1 elevator, to get out of the smoke.

I seen then that there were four other Japanese aircraft up there. Our 20 millimeters and 5-inchers and 40 millimeters were shooting at them.

When I looked out over the ocean, all the ships around us had disappeared, except for two tin cans -- destroyers -- one on each side of us. Here we were, sitting ducks, because once you're hit, the kamikazes try to finish you off.

We knocked three of them down that were together on the port side. The fourth one was circling way out away from us. He came around the front of the ship and to our starboard side, but out pretty far, maybe two, three miles.

Then I seen him coming towards the ship. And I wanna tell you something: Some of the biggest blokes and the brawniest good- looking guys were the ones that were screaming like babies, crying. That's how scared they were. My heart started pounding like crazy.

Our guns were firing at this aircraft, and you could see the tracers glancing off the front of his wings. But they couldn't knock him down.

I started running like hell to get out of the way. He looked like he was gonna hit where I was! I ran over to the port side and jumped down into the catwalk where the 20mm cannons are.

One kid that was operating a gun was hit and injured, so I thought: Hey, I can throw something at this Japanese, so I strapped myself to the gun -- it had braces that came down around your shoulders -- and I got a few bursts in. But then the gun jammed. What am I gonna do? I can't throw it at him.

I jumped into a little compartment where they store tires and other parts. And this aircraft hit the island right above the wheelhouse and knocked out our radar. Scuttlebutt was going about the ship that the skipper, Dixie Kiefer, was hurt real bad. He got 85 shrapnel wounds in him, but he survived. The exec, the second in command, was killed instantly.

The guys operating the radar, three of them come piling out of there because the radar mount was just hanging by a little bit of steel, and it was burning bad. They started going up the rope ladders to get away from the fire, and their pant legs were burning.

I came back up on the flight deck to help fight the fire around No. 1 elevator. But there were so many guys with hoses and water, there was nothing I could do.

This guy from Jim Thorpe came running to look for me -- James Redline, his name was. He told me that my cousin Charlie Rehrig, who was from Bowmanstown, was hit real bad. He'd caught some shrapnel in his head, and they didn't expect him to live. He was back on the fantail, where they'd covered the injured sailors with open parachutes.

As I ran aft to see my cousin, I came across the Japanese pilot that had hit the island. He was severed, laying there on the flight deck -- half of him, from his chest on up. He had his arms stretched out and his head tilted to the side, no cap or goggles. His face wasn't distorted in any way; he had his eyes open.

We were gonna grab him and throw him over the side, and this guy yelled, "No, no, wait a minute!" He'd seen the Japanese guy had a ring on his finger. So he got his seaman's knife out and he cut the guy's finger off to get the ring. Then we got this pilot by the arms and threw him overboard.

I found my cousin on the fantail, laying there with a bad gash in his head, and they were giving him blood plasma. Some of the officers said, "Let's take him down to sick bay." We carried him on a stretcher down to the hangar deck. Below that, on the third deck, was the hospital area.

When we got on the hangar deck, I noticed this guy laying on the floor, and I knew him. It was my good friend Bob Selby. He was the operator of No. 2 elevator, a big platform on the side of the ship where they can push an aircraft on, take it down to hangar-deck level and push it off for repairs.

Selby and I were like brothers. I'd kid with him, we'd go to chow together, we'd go on liberty together, we'd talk about the kind of life we lived at home.

He had his left arm up, waving, so I knew he was still alive.

We took my cousin down to the hospital area, and the doctors were working on other people that were injured. I went back up on the hangar deck and ran to my buddy Selby, who was really bleeding bad.

His right arm was completely severed at the shoulder, blown off, but he was conscious. He looked like he was flash-burned from the thousand-pound bomb that exploded on the hangar deck.

I quick took some packing and held it on his wound and put his head in my lap and tried to comfort him: "You'll be all right, just hang in there, hang in there with me. I'll take care of you." He was crying. He kept saying, "I'll never make it." I said, "C'mon, don't talk like that. You'll pull through this."

But even at my young age, I knew it was a critical wound -- he had lost too much blood -- and he never would have survived it.

I kept yelling for help, and finally we put Selby on a stretcher and got him down to sick bay. The doctors seen he was injured so bad, they put him right on an operating table, and I stood there waiting. He had his knees up and was waving them back and forth. And then they just stopped.

The doctor came out and said, "He's gone."

It just plays hell with you when you see stuff like that. I felt so bad about it that I just can't ever forget it.

Bodies like potato sacks

I had a very good friend, George Lachner, a helluva nice guy. We used to call him Pop. He was in his early 30s, a plane captain. If you ran into any kind of a problem, he would come and help you regardless what he had to do.

He was sitting in an F-6 fighter on the hangar deck, had the canopy closed. Crew members had pushed his plane over to send it up No. 1 elevator, which was down when the first kamikaze hit.

The plane was burnt. The heat had been so tremendous.

I walked over to his aircraft, and they opened the canopy. He was just sitting there in the cockpit, looking straight ahead. He was so charred he was as black as the ace of spades, burnt to a crisp.

Boy, when I seen that, I just absolutely almost passed out. I wouldn't even get up on the wing. He looked just like somebody cut a board out of a person and painted it black and put him in the cockpit.

One of the guys that jumped up to take him out to put him in a bag grabbed his arm and it came off in pieces. He just fell apart. They had to shovel him out of there.

That night, I was put on a detail down in the hangar deck. It had about 6 inches of water in the forward part. And they didn't dare to burn any lights, because they would've given away our position to submarines. We had to try and gather all the dead we could find.

Most were aircraft handlers that were killed. They all were running to push aircraft aboard No. 1 elevator or moving them from spots on the side elevator.

If I had gone to lunch instead of putting it off, I would've gone down to the hangar deck, then down another deck to the dining area. I would've been going through the hangar deck when the first kamikaze hit and its bomb went off.

It was such a horrible bomb. You're talking 6-inch-thick armor plating on the hangar-deck floor, and the bomb dented the armor plating. Some of the bomb fragments went through the floor, punching holes right through the steel.

Of course, when the fire began, all the sprinkler systems came on. All the water that came from the sprinklers collected into that dent in the armor plating and went down through the holes in the hangar deck floor into the compartments below.

There were sailors in those compartments, and when you go into general quarters, every compartment's locked. You can't get out; you can't get in. The compartments filled up with water, and those sailors drowned. They were in there until we came back to Seattle.

The hangar deck was so dark at night when we were looking for bodies, it seemed we were walking down a canyon of death.

All these electrical lines along the walls were severed by shrapnel and burnt black. When you'd go into a wave, these wires would rub together and sparks would fly.

There was a line of us guys. You'd walk through the water with your hands out in front of you, feeling through the water to see if there was a body there. And you'd come up with an arm or a leg or a head or a body, and you'd drag him behind curtains they had drawn, fire curtains, where they had the lights lit. They had big white flour bags where they put the body parts or a body.

Up on the flight deck, I helped pick up the dead people. A lot of them were burned bad and dismembered. There was a weather station in this one compartment below this 40 mm mount on the flight deck, and it had an overhead metal door. We opened that overhead door, and we stacked the bodies in like potato sacks.

The following morning, I was put on a detail to put these in body bags. Man, we opened that overhead door and such a stench came out of there that almost blew you out of your socks. You smelled the stench of death, flesh rotting and burnt. It will stay with me the rest of my life. I'll never get rid of it.

We took a body at a time and we put him in a bag and put an empty 5-inch shell at his feet to weigh him down, and then we closed the bag up. We laid the bags side by side on the flight deck for burial.

That afternoon, we had a burial service. There was a chute they laid the body bag on, and the bags slid off it and into the ocean.

Silk hats at the signing

After the kamikazes hit us, the skipper knew what to do. We headed for the nearest rain squall -- clouds, overcast -- where the Japanese wouldn't see us.

We burned for eight hours.

Five times we went into "abandon ship" and ran to the side and waited to jump over. But then they blew the bugle to retreat. We'd get the fires under control and then they would flare up again. Finally we managed to outten the fires and stabilize the ship.

We went to Ulithi, which was a natural anchorage for Adm. Halsey's 3rd Fleet, then back to Pearl Harbor, then to Seattle, where we went into dry dock because we were really damaged bad. The ship was refitted there.

On our second cruise, we got F-4U Corsairs, the fighters with the gull wings, and Marine pilots. We were operating off the coast of Japan when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. We'd slept up on the flight deck that night, and the next day we were covered with white powder, and the ocean was full of dust and debris.

Sept. 2, 1945: I was sitting on the forward corner of the flight deck, with my legs hanging down, looking right down on the deck of the USS Missouri when the surrender was signed. I saw MacArthur and the Japanese dignitaries with their high silk hats, and I watched them sign the papers.

It kept going through my mind: I made it! I made it! I made it through this war!

Epilogue

The Ticonderoga lost 140 of its 3,500 crewmen in the kamikaze attacks.

Charlie Rehrig, Horace's cousin, survived. "The surgeon told me after the operation: "One hair's thickness deeper with that shrapnel, it would've killed him.' Charlie had a plate in his head for the rest of his life."

Rehrig's older brother Laird wasn't so lucky. An acting sergeant in the 9th Infantry Division, he was killed in Normandy soon after D- Day.

"When I came home from the service," Rehrig said, "my mother and father had heard different stories about my brother, that he might be alive. Somebody told them he was down at Valley Forge Army Hospital."

To placate his parents, Rehrig went to the hospital to look for Laird. An employee gave him a tour. "There were people there that had no face anymore, their nose was burned away, no ears and a little hole for their mouths. I saw people that were out of their minds, running into the walls of the padded cells they were in."

But Laird wasn't there. "I believe that satisfied my mother and father more than anything, to find out that he was not down there."

Laird was the subject of the first installment of this War Stories series, on Memorial Day 1999. In that account, Willard "Bill" Haas, Laird's German teacher from Lehighton High, who became an Army medic, told of meeting his former student in Normandy -- and a week later learning a German shell had killed him.

Haas told Rehrig's parents how Laird died, and they got his body home.

In 1946, Horace Rehrig married a former classmate, LaRue Muthard. "When I was 7 years old, I told my neighbors that I was gonna marry her." Her brother Robert, who was in the Army, had been killed in Germany. "She cries today for the loss of him."

The couple has a daughter, Cynthia Eisenhower, and a son, Rick.

Rehrig worked as an auto body mechanic and as a supervisor for Erie Insurance in Allentown.

"For a long time after I came back home, I couldn't go to funerals," he said. "I seen too much death in my young days. And even today it bothers me.

"I'm not sorry that I spent the time that I did, the three or four years of my life in the war. I'd do it all over again today, because I think the world of this country."